What Else Matters as AI Eats the World // BRXND Digest vol 114
On GLP-1s, creators as enduring arbiters of culture, and the pursuit of what's real
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What Else Matters as AI Eats the World
Last Sunday, Benedict Evans dropped his (now bi-annual) magnum opus presentation on the exultant nerds of the internet. For the fourth edition in a row, the title is “AI Eats the World.”
Gun to my head, if I were asked to come up with the pithiest possible take for marketers on what we do here at BRXND, I’d answer: “help marketers navigate AI eating the world.”
As Noah said when we announced this year’s flagship event in the last edition, the most important umbrella narrative for marketers right now is how AI will fundamentally reshape the way consumers build preference and purchase brands.
But this is not the only narrative that matters. One theory I have is that a decent chunk of the negative sentiment towards AI among some marketing leaders stems from the fact that AI is a narrative fire that sucks all the oxygen out of the ecosystem. Even if AI remained in its 2022 state, we’d still be living through unusually transformative times for marketing and media.
In other words, there’s a lot happening. Here, in rough order of importance, are what I believe the most important tentpole stories are for marketing leaders, alongside “AI Eats the World.”
GLP1s reshape the American consumer: Craig Fuller at FreightWaves has an early contender for underreported stat of the year. Snack companies have already taken out one million fewer truckloads to date. In addition, Frito-Lay has closed two plants, Campbell’s shut its chip factory in Massachusetts, and Smuckers took a $1B loss on Twinkies. One molecule is quite literally reshaping American consumerism and culture.
If you’re reading this as the brand manager of Pringles, Kool-Aid, or KitKat, thinking deeply about how to reposition your product when the fundamental way that millions of humans experience desire shifts beneath your feet is probably costing you a little more sleep than say….how your brand shows up in ChatGPT. But demand creation always finds a way and for every dollar lost as GLP-1s tame the reckless pursuit of satiation, new ones will be minted building brands that cater to a more active and vice-free lifestyle.
The ubiquity of GLP-1s won’t just reshape the CPG landscape. It will also push meaningfully downstream into media, entertainment and consumer technology. (Author’s note– god dammit, sometimes this AI slop sentence construct is just the one you need.) I have absolutely no idea what this will look like, but am keen to dig in much further.
The extended golden age of the creator as arbiter of culture: Much like Jim Barksdale’s quip that the only ways to make money are “bundling and unbundling,” influence over a populace tends to be constantly shifting on a pendulum between institutional and individual power. Two or three years ago, it was reasonable to posit that we might be hitting a peak cycle in the creator economy. We could fully touch grass again, and the creators minted in the last era were themselves becoming massive institutional media powerhouses. Hawk Tuah’s 15 minutes of fame mercifully came and went.
However, the creator middle class—something I incorrectly pegged as a pure COVID-era phenomenon—has proved shockingly enduring and impactful for brands. Companies like ShopMy have opened up more monetization options than ever for creators and helped the channel cross the chasm into being a true performance play for marketers.
Creators are the perfect antidote to the slop cannons dominating feeds in that their humanity and individual taste is ostensibly why people are drawn to them in the first place. Ironically, this “humanity” is uniquely powerful training data that right now mostly lives within a few walled gardens (YouTube, Meta, Tiktok) and thus, could only be used as an essential signal to an agent on those platforms. This is a big advantage for Hatch.
Given all the former Meta leaders building ChatGPT ads, it’s safe to imagine OpenAI is acutely aware of this and working to incorporate creator reviews as both a contextual relevance signal for ads and likely creator storefronts as a front-end user experience in future versions of the platform.
The internet is dead, everything is fake, and we’re in the golden age of grift: Last Friday, New York published a great piece titled “The Feed is Fake.” Naturally, it was flippantly mocked by the “ultra-online” crowd, who basically argued, “ya bro, everything online has been virality schemes all the way down since at least 2021.” I personally don’t believe most of this reporting is common knowledge.
In a saner world, all the dead internet and fake engagement tactics would have mostly commoditized and no longer be effective. But with each passing day, more and more of what goes viral in both consumer and B2B is a product of pure synthetic form, a weird internet cesspool of clippers, pay-to-play boosters, and engagement pods. Often, the few arbiters of culture with gravitas left (i.e. New York Times reporters) mistake the pay-to-play traffic for signal and mainstream a trend that simply does not actually exist. It’s all the mid-2010s era manipulating the media Tucker Max stuff on speed.
I’ve fielded many inquiries on these tactics from friends on this who know my less scrupulous growth hacker roots. Truthfully, I know little tactically of this game. But it’s hard to see the straightest shooters feeling immense pressure to capitulate to the bullshit.
Where this really gets interesting is that the savviest builders of the Potemkin Village are now moving on to a new hustle. Their bet is that in the near future, they won’t be trying to influence people at all but that faux engagement schemes will be catnip for persuading agents. The theory is that agents will look for the simplest heuristics when they act on a user’s behalf. Thus, flooding the zone with shit to make “number go up” will convince an agent something has momentum.
It’s a tidy hypothesis but one that may well prove to be wrong. The models are weird– predicting what they will actually be persuaded by with any confidence at this moment in time is a fool’s errand.
Everything under the sun is truly an ad network: Few analysts have seen their takes age better over the years than Eric Seufert, the pro-advertising provocateur extraordinaire. He insisted that ads were coming to ChatGPT even when Sam Altman was in dogmatic denial, has called the many resurrections of Meta, and most notably coined the notion that “everything is an ad network.”
It’s only extrapolated from there: United, 7-Eleven, JP Morgan, Shell, Lyft, and Ace Hardware are all in the ad sales business. Practically, this means that 100+ CMOs across the FORTUNE 500 are now buyers and sellers of media. One of the core functions of a marketing leader is now to drive demand not just for your products but for your ad services as well.
More will come. The ability to generate digital rectangles out of thin air and sell them at 90% gross margins is truly one of the miracles of capitalism. Given how unwieldy this will ultimately be for CMOs trying to understand the landscape, many smaller players will get rolled up or sold through middlemen– Barksdale for the win again.
It’s easy to take the cynical frame on this but there’s a better question here. With all the free cash flow that ads create for a retail, travel or finance business, what kind of bolder, capital-intensive innovation bets are you going to use that found money to unlock?
TikTok Shop grows up: For most of its existence, a reasonable read on TikTok Shop was that it would be an utterly weird, multibillion-dollar marketplace that no real enterprise marketer had to worry about. A few cracked internet entrepreneurs you knew in high school would get hilariously rich selling knock-off curling irons. And then maybe the whole thing would get shut down.
Free of existential regulatory concerns, TikTok Shop now looks primed to hit another gear. The company is now on pace for $25B in sales in 2026, and Ralph Lauen, Olaplex, and Ulta have recently set up storefronts on the platform, joining Crocs and L’Oreal.
There really is no other social commerce play in the West with any viable scale (Whatnot, I guess?), and as the cost to create ungodly amounts of creative come down, it’s hard not to see more and more brands flocking to a net new distribution medium. I’d be sweating a little if I were Walmart and Target here.
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As we think about our coverage this year and programming for the NYC event, I’d love to hear from you all further on this.
Which of these larger narratives, if any, should we cover here in BRXND in addition to AI eats the world? What did we miss? Drop me a note at mike@brxnd.ai. And of course, I can’t wait to meet many of you in November at BRXND NYC 2026.
— Mike